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The ultimate 2016 email marketing benchmark guide

Email continues to be an extremely important marketing channel, so it’s important to know how well your email efforts are performing.

But while it’s easy to find out how many clicks, opens and so on your emails are getting, it can be difficult to understand the significance of those numbers without having something to benchmark them against.

A new report from Sign-up.to analysed more than 1bn emails sent through its platform across all sectors and devices to create some email marketing benchmark figures for 2016.

In this post I’m going to dig into the report and show you the key facts and figures you need to be aware of.

Key highlights

Before delving into too much detail about this report, let’s first look at the top-line figures for opens, click-through rate (CTR), unsubscribes, click-to-open rate (CTO) and unsubscribe-to-open rate (UTO).

These are averaged across all sectors and devices, but I will break the numbers down further as I go through this post.

Opens: 24.88% (up 0.43% YoY)

CTR: 3.42% (up 0.29% YoY)

Unsubscribes: 0.52% (down 0.03% YoY)

CTO: 10.88% (up 0.09% YoY)

UTO: 2.72% (up 0.04% YoY)

As you can see, in general terms things are improving (albeit not by a huge margin).

Now I know you’d all love to see some more numbers, so let’s delve a little deeper into the top-line figures.

Open rates

While a 0.43% YoY increase in open rates is certainly nothing to write home about, it does at least suggest that email continues to be a relevant channel.

Relevant in the sense that people are still responsive to it, even more so than last year.

Looking at sectors, legal and accounting enjoyed the highest open rates of all, with 37.25%. The next two most successful sectors are TV, radio and film (35.81%) and government (33.99%).

The charity sector also fairs well (30.88%), being the only other sector to achieve open rates higher than 30%.

At the bottom end of the sector scale is ‘other service (B2B)’ at 18.47%, events (19.91%) and restaurant/hospitality (20.47%).

Bad news for recruiters, too, who only achieve a 20.63% open rate on average.

Click-through rates (CTR)

Government is the clear winner here, with 9.69% CTR, so one can only assume that either this sector understands its audience better than most or people in the UK just can’t get enough of politics.

Legal/accounting faired well again (6.75%), with construction coming in third with 6.29%.

But as with opens, success varies wildly across all sectors.

TV, radio and film achieves only a 1.33% CTR, with PR faring only slightly better (1.35%) and restaurant/hospitality only seeing 1.37%.

Clearly these sectors at the lower end of the scale need to rethink their strategy.

Either their email content is not engaging and relevant enough or they’re simply not sending it to the right people.

Unsubscribe rates

Overall, unsubscribe rates look positive. While they’re only down a marginal amount since 2015, the total rates are still pretty low, although they are much higher than in 2012.

Construction sees the highest unsubscribe rate at 0.97%, with recruitment/HR (0.87%) and legal/accounting (0.85%) taking second and third place respectively.

On the other end of the scale, government is the best performer with 0.23%, followed by wholesale (0.24%) and charity/non-profit (0.26%).

Click-to-open (CTO) rates

CTO – i.e. the number of opened emails that had a link clicked – is another important metric when it comes to email marketing.

Government performs well again in this section given that it sits at or very near the top of both the opens and CTR rankings.

But other sectors sit much higher up on this list than the previous two, such as fashion (15.23%) and publishing (15.11%).

These latter figures tell an interesting story about fashion and publishing.

Both sectors score very low in terms of open rates, but of the people who do actually open the emails a large proportion go on to click a link.

This suggests that the content within the emails is relevant and engaging, but either the subject lines are not connecting with people or many of the recipients don’t feel the emails are relevant enough to them to warrant an open.

Unsubscribe-to-open (UTO) rates

Now here’s the part where we find out which sectors are turning people off with their email marketing.

UTO is a more accurate measure of subscriber loyalty because, similarly to CTO, it measurers the number of unsubscribes in proportion to the number of opens.

Top of the list is recruitment/HR with a 4% UTO rate, arguably driven by the sheer amount of emails along the line of: ‘Oh hi, we’ve got this really great role for you based on your CV you registered with us 10 years ago when you first left sixth form college.’

I’m exaggerating of course, but you get the point.

Next on the list for UTO is IT at 4.37%, but perhaps the most interesting one here – and by interesting I mean clearly doing something very wrong – is ‘other service (B2B)’ at 4.15%.

This sector is not only the absolute worst performer in terms of email opens, but it also has the third highest proportion of people unsubscribing from the mailing list once they do open an email.

Hardly the kind of figures you’d want to be reporting to the powers that be…